So it got warm in L.A., then semi-cold again — and I’ve been drinking fair trade, organic hot chocolate, courtesy of fair trade company Equal Exchange.

Equal Exchange’s Spicy Hot Cocoa’s got a kick of chili and cinnamon. Those spices, along with the cocoa powder, sugar cane juice, and vanilla powder, are all organic! And the cocoa and sugar are fair trade certified.

Which made me wonder: Why isn’t the vanilla fair trade certified?

Of course, TransFair USA — the nonprofit that awards fair trade certification for U.S. products, allows many products with just one fair trade ingredient to get fair trade certified. For example, some of Ben & Jerry’s coffee-flavored ice creams are fair trade certified because they incorporate fair trade coffee — despite the fact that the sugar, which makes up a larger part of the ice cream than the coffee, is not fair trade certified.

Considering that, Equal Exchange is already going the extra mile by using both fair trade sugar AND fair trade cocoa in its hot chocolate. Still, here’s what I heard back about the vanilla, thanks to Dary Goodrich, Chocolate Products Manager at Equal Exchange:

At this point, we have not been able to find a FTC vanilla suitable to our needs (e.g. organic, the correct format to work in our hot cocoa, and price accessible). This is something we will continue to look into as FTC vanilla becomes more readily available in the market. As you know we made the switch for our bars, which just requires ground vanilla beans and not vanilla powder. Also, vanilla is less than 1% of the product, which means we don’t buy much of it.

This answer satisfies me — but at the same time makes me a little sad that even a fair trade committed company like Equal Exchange can’t use fair trade vanilla in all its products….

That said, Equal Exchange’s come out with four different hot choco products, and to please the purists, some are all fair trade. The Drinking Chocolate and Baking Cocoa are made entirely of fair trade ingredients.

After trying out Equal Exchange’s cocoa, I was surprised to find that fair trade cocoa’s actually become a rather competitive market! I stopped by my neighborhood Whole Foods and Co-opportunity to find three different fair trade cocoas readily available on the shelves:

>> Dagoba offers a spicy Xocolatl Hot Chocolateas well as an unsweetened hot chocolate

>> Lake Champlain offers a hot chocolate
as well as unsweetened vegan cocoa.

>> Green & Black’s website only shows one fair trade cocoa powder, but I could swear I also saw a fair trade Maya Gold hot cocoa at Whole Foods the other day.

>> Trader Joe’s offers its own fair trade certified cocoa powder.

All of these products are both fair trade and organic certified — though the former comes with caveats. The unsweetened cocoas for all companies are basically made of organic, fair trade cocoa powder, so those are pretty much 100% fair trade products. As for the multi-ingredient hot cocoas, however, I couldn’t find out from these companies websites if the sugar and other ingredients were fair trade certified.
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I’ll keep looking into that — but I appreciate the fact that Equal Exchange lists both its full ingredient lists — including organic and fair trade information — on its website.

[crossposted on BlogHer]

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